Peter Frase

I've been having some conversations about Occupy and its legacy, and whether it "succeeded". I tend to think that if such a question is meaningful at all, I'd have to answer by going the [Zhou Enlai](https://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/) route. But then I was thinking about the improbable media breakout of Thomas Piketty and his doorstop treatise *Capital in the 21st Century*.

A few years ago, Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez were obscure economists, well known to income data nerds like me but otherwise anonymous as they went about generating pictures like this:

Then Occupy happened, and we saw things like this:

And now we have this:

Both Piketty's theory and Occupy's practice are open to criticism---some of both will be forthcoming in *Jacobin*. And of course the salience of inequality, and hence Piketty's star profile, aren't wholly a product of Occupy. Still, one could hardly ask for a simpler illustration of the dialectic of theory and practice, and of Marx's [contention](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm) that "theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses."